Very-Large-Scale Integration-Friendly Method for Vital Activity Detection with Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave Radars

A simple algorithm for respiratory activity detection in data produced by Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) radars is presented in this paper. The proposed computational architecture can be directly mapped onto custom digital–analog VLSI hardware, which is a unique approach in research on intelligent FMCW sensor development, offering a potential energy-efficient data analysis solution for target applications, such as preventing human trafficking or providing life-sign detection under limited visibility. The algorithm comprises two main modules. The first one summarizes radar-produced data into a descriptor reflecting the amount of motion that occurs within appropriately determined time intervals. The second one classifies a sequence of the produced descriptors using a recurrent neural network composed of gated recurrent units. To ensure the algorithm’s implementation feasibility, an analog VLSI circuit comprising its main functional blocks has been designed, manufactured, and tested, providing constraints for neural model derivation. The adverse effects of the primary constraint, the severe restriction on admissible weight resolution, have been handled by introducing a novel training loss component and a simple mechanism for diversifying the effective weight sets of different network neurons. Experimental evaluation of the presented method, performed using the dataset of indoor recordings, indicates that the proposed simple, hardware implementation-friendly algorithm provides over 94% human detection accuracy and similar F1 scores.